


Pluck & Other Musings

by okapi



Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: M/M, Pluck - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-06 09:59:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17343221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: 1.Pluck.Raffles muses on pluck. Gen. Triple drabble.2.Familiar/ New.Raffles muses on Bunny, the familiar and the new. Set after "The Ides of March."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First foray into this fandom. Hope to have a feature-length fic posted by the Ides. 
> 
> For the DW picture prompt fun Challenge 49 - Photo 97.

Pluck? What is pluck? Courage, of course, but it’s more than just overcoming a fear, acting in spite of it. A fellow can be courageous in a moment, get his name in the paper for it, then hie back to his mousehole and be content with crumbs for the rest of his life. But pluck, well, pluck means wanting things just beyond reach and reaching for them.

And, sometimes, getting them.

Pluck is standing before a sheet of falling water in nothing but the sense Providence bestowed and taking the plunge. Pluck put you there, on that slippery rock, before the devil’s own cataract, though it may have been tomfoolery that lost you your clothes, and pluck is the deep lung-burning breath and that first step, rheumier than an ancient mariner’s knee. Pluck keeps your head on your shoulders when that butcher’s ax of water wants to make you chops of you. Sink or swim? Pluck never sinks.

Pluck is like a diamond, even when it’s buried in a mountain of nothing-looking ore. A stick of dynamite or, says, a cataclysmic concatenation of circumstance, can bring it to light, or rather, to bring light to it and not just light but another eye to see the shine and know it for the gem is. Pluck defers a moment’s ease of a glass of whiskey for the honour of sitting in a chair that’s not got a bill of sale on it.

Pluck is quite right and worse than wrong. And once you’ve slid down the murderous falls and bobbed up to the surface well and alive, well, you want to do it again, not right away, perhaps, but some day, one day. Once you’ve wakened pluck, well, it might catnap now and then, but it never goes back to sleep.


	2. Familiar / New.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raffles muses on Bunny, the familiar and the new. Set after "The Ides of March."
> 
> For DW Drabblezone prompt 125 - Familiar. Also for DW 100 fandoms prompt 012. new.

Bunny Manders was familiarity itself. After all, I’d known him at school, and not just known him, but relied on him for all kinds of things, from writing verses to letting down a rope to getting me out of the narrowest squeak of my early years. He’d stick at nothing for a pal. He was the right sort of little beggar. He was a good man in a pinch. I knew all that.

Even before Bunny showed up on my doorstep for a second time that night, I knew he had money troubles. I didn’t suspect just how bad off he was, but he had a look I’d seen in other men and in the mirror, a familiar desperation made up in clownish greasepaint.

Yes, I knew Bunny, and I didn’t know him. He was a stranger. That gun to his head. That was new. I’d never supposed he had the stuff for something like that. It was fascinating to see the plucky little devil who did me that good turn exposed, the rabbit stripped of timidity.

He was quite right, and what I felt, what I thought, was worse than wrong.

Bunny Manders was, without a doubt, my man.


End file.
